The Eldritch Conspiracy Read online

  “You wouldn’t dare,” he said in a dangerous, venomous whisper. I could actually feel the power of his magic building in the room, rising like scalding water.

  I met his eyes without flinching, without backing down. “I’ll have Dawna cut you a check for the days you’ve actually been on the assignment.”

  In a fit of pique, he’d taken both vans and all the contractors except Maria, Luis, and Lorenzo. It had floored me that he would risk people’s lives that way. Totally unprofessional.

  And very likely unforgivable.

  But I’d gotten them all out. By myself. The only person who would be embarrassed by that was John Creede. The tricky part was going to be figuring out how to get the word out that I’d succeeded without “taking the credit.” That little bomb hit me as I stared at the empty room.

  “Celia.” Dawna’s voice brought me back to the present. “Are you okay? You look … odd.”

  I didn’t feel odd. I felt hurt, sad, humiliated, and pissed. John and I had been fairly serious. I’d really thought he respected me as a person and as a professional, and that we’d be able to work well together. Apparently I’d been wrong. It hurt. A lot.

  She passed me over a cup of steaming coffee. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “Not yet.” Again, maybe never.

  The eyes that met mine were worried. “Okay.” She sounded doubtful. “If you say so.”

  “I do.”

  I was spared further discussion by Ron’s baritone bellow from downstairs. “Dawna!”

  “Oh hell,” she muttered. Ron may not be my favorite tenant, but Dawna loathes him. Of course, since she’s the receptionist, she bears the brunt of most of his bad behavior. More than once he’s driven her close to quitting or to violence. He thinks his law degree makes him superior to the rest of us mere mortals. He’s an autocratic, demanding bully, but he pays his rent on time and ponies up for building maintenance without too much complaint, so I’ve put up with him.

  I laughed. “Good to see some things haven’t changed. Go. I’m all right.”

  “But we were going to talk.” She cast a filthy look at the staircase.

  I knew she didn’t want to go down there. I couldn’t even blame her. But it was her job. Like it or (obviously) not. “We will. Later. Go.”

  With a huge sigh, she flounced down the stairs and back to work.

  Later was a lot later. Ron kept Dawna hopping all morning and I wound up having an unexpected visitor.

  * * *

  “I need you to find my daughter.”

  The sunlight streaming into my office through the balcony windows wasn’t being kind to the woman seated across the desk from me. Laka is from the Isle of Serenity, home of the Pacific sirens, and usually she looks lovely, thanks to her Polynesian coloring and features and a wide, easy smile that can light up a room. But she wasn’t smiling today and there were lines of worry on her face, which I’d never seen before. She was dressed simply and wore no makeup, her hair pulled back in a thick braid that hung down her back. She looked old and tired. Then again, she probably was. Sirens can live a long time, and if her teenage daughter, Okalani, was missing, Laka probably wasn’t getting much sleep.

  I weighed how to respond. I’d met Laka’s daughter a couple of years earlier when I’d been on Serenity on business. Okalani had a remarkable talent—she was a strong enough teleporter to be able to transport groups of people. She’d saved my life, and the lives of a lot of other people, using that gift. And while she had an attitude problem—what teenager doesn’t?—I’d kind of liked the kid.

  I wasn’t surprised she’d gone missing. From the first moment I’d met her, she’d made it very clear that she wanted to get off Serenity and find her long-lost father and brother.

  “Have you talked to her father?”

  Laka gave a frustrated snort. Granted, contacting Okalani’s dad was an obvious thing to do. But you’d be surprised how often people don’t actually do the obvious.

  “He won’t take my calls. I went to the address in the telephone directory. His ex-wife says he’s gone, and good riddance. I thought she might be lying, but there are initial divorce papers filed at the courthouse.”

  “What about your son?”

  Her expression saddened, growing haunted. “My son is dead. He was killed in a vampire attack after one of his high-school football games.”

  “I’m so sorry.” I was, too. Few football games are held at night because of the risks, but with the days so short in the fall and winter, sometimes games end after dark. The police do the best they can, but accidents happen. Tragic.

  “Thank you. Losing him to Ricky was hard. But his death … perhaps you can understand now why I tried so hard to keep Okalani from coming to the mainland.”

  I did, actually. The siren Isle of Serenity has never had a vampire, never known a werewolf attack. The mental control the queen has over the island residents would force them to leave. I could understand Laka’s desperation, knowing her daughter was on her own in circumstances unlike anything she’d ever experienced. That didn’t mean I could help her. “Laka, I’m a bodyguard, not a private investigator. But I know of a couple of reputable—”

  “No,” she interrupted me. “Please … Okalani likes you, she trusts you.” I started to explain that I wasn’t trained to find people, but she interrupted me again. “But you’re very good at uncovering the truth, Princess.” Okay, now she was interrupting thoughts I hadn’t spoken. Was she was rummaging around in my head?

  I intentionally let my thoughts about her daughter go blank, focusing instead on the room. The curtains at the balcony doors were open, letting in lots of bright sunlight that gleamed off the wide, white trim of the baseboards and made the pale peach walls look even paler than usual. I loved my big desk, which had two visitor chairs facing it; there was a second seating area in one corner, with a couch, a side chair, and a low table. Behind me was a large gun safe. Painted a dark forest green, the safe was a new addition to the office décor, and one I wasn’t entirely pleased about.

  I saw Laka’s face register confusion for a moment before she looked directly at the gun safe. Got her. Sirens are telepathic. The “siren call” people talk about is a psychic compulsion, not some sort of music in the air. While it’s considered extremely bad manners to intrude into other people’s heads willy-nilly, many of the sirens I’ve met do it a lot.

  Most of them can carry on conversations both audibly and mentally with equal ease. I’ve had to work hard to get good at that, but I don’t really like doing it unless it’s an emergency. It creeps people out. Hell, it creeps me out. I still haven’t mastered keeping others out of my thoughts. Then again, I’m only one-fourth siren and my abilities were brought out by the bite of a master vampire who was trying to turn me. I may technically be a siren—and the multi-grandniece of Queen Lopaka—but I hadn’t had a clue about that part of my heritage until the bat bite.

  Laka eavesdropping on my thoughts without permission ticked me off. A lot.

  Stop it! I growled the words in my head. I was sorely tempted to show her the door, enough so that I started to rise from my seat.

  Laka flushed, but kept talking, desperation forcing her words out in a rush. “Hear me out, please, Princess. Ricky, Okalani’s father, has always been clever and charismatic. Charming enough to win people over, to convince them of whatever he wants them to believe. He talks his way into good jobs, and people who meet him would swear he isn’t capable of stealing or conning people out of their money. But he is.”

  Something swam through her dark eyes, some memory that she wasn’t yet ready to reveal—and I wouldn’t dive into her head to pry it out. I sat back down, inhaling the thick scent of flowers that surrounded her. “When he was with me, on Serenity, I used my powers to keep him in check. Too many of my fellow sirens would have been easy pickings for Ricky, since at that time money didn’t have much value on Serenity. I didn’t allow him to take advantage of people. He hated that. He said I was ma
nipulating him, making him into someone he wasn’t. In a way, he was correct. I could make him do what was right. But I couldn’t make him want to do it. Perhaps I was wrong to try to make him become a more ethical person. He grew to hate me, and to hate all sirens, because of what I did.”

  “So you sent him away.”

  I tried not to put any particular emotion in my words, but my feelings probably showed in my mind. I don’t like that the sirens have historically considered men nothing more than tools of procreation. Their female-centric culture throws away male partners and male children like so much trash.

  Laka’s chin came up, her expression conveying pride, stubbornness, and hurt. It was an old wound, but I could tell from her expression that it still ached. “I did. I let him take our son, but I kept Okalani away from him.”

  I thought back, remembering what she’d said to me the first night I’d met her, the night Okalani had teleported herself onto my friend Bubba’s boat. I’d nearly killed the youngster, thinking she was an enemy intruder.

  “You told me before that he was bitter about being sent away?” I made it a question.

  She sighed. “Yes. He was … is. It makes no sense to me. He hated me for making him law-abiding, but he hated it even more when I rejected him.”

  “And you think he’ll take it out on your daughter by rejecting her?”

  She shook her head and her expression grew hard and grim. “Oh, no. He won’t reject her. He’ll use her.”

  The way she said that … an image appeared in my mind. A darkened building, figures in black, and a floor-to-ceiling vault door. Whether it was my own vision or projected into my head by Laka, I suddenly understood why she was so panicked.

  “You think he would use Okalani’s gift to steal things?”

  Her jaw tightened, like it wasn’t something she wanted said out loud. But I’m like that. If it can’t be said out loud, it shouldn’t be thought. “I would rather not think he is capable of outright theft.”

  A moment’s thought provided all too many ways Okalani could be of terrific use to a con man and thief—the possibilities were endless. A simple variation of the old shell game, where instead of being palmed and moved, the ball would simply disappear into Okalani’s hand while she stood several feet away. An apartment full of priceless antiques one minute, the next … empty, the thief chatting with the owner throughout the robbery. A murder suspect seemingly in two places at once, with witnesses in both places. I hid all that in my mind as best I could, and erected what few barriers I knew to keep Laka out. She didn’t need to know how dark my thoughts were.

  The siren looked beseechingly at me. “Please, Princess … please help me find my daughter.”

  Scooting back my chair, I opened my center desk drawer and pulled out a leather case that held alphabetized business cards. Flipping to “P,” I selected one from the mix of private investigators and handed it across the desk. “Call Harry Carson. He’s one of the best I know. I’ll do some looking around and I’ll talk to Okalani if I find her, but he’ll find her if I can’t.”

  She took the card and stared at it with relief plain on her face. Dark eyes filled with gratitude raised to meet mine. “Thank you, Princess. If there’s anything I can ever do—”

  I flinched involuntarily for at least the third time since she arrived. “Actually, there is.” I rose and stepped around the desk.

  She raised her eyebrows and cocked her head as I walked past her to the door, turned the knob, and opened it. My meaning was obvious; Laka stood and headed for the exit, pausing when we were inches apart to repeat, “Anything.”

  I sighed and looked at her wearily. “Stop calling me Princess.”

  3

  It was my morning for siren trouble. After Laka left, I started sorting through my messages, trying to put them in order of priority. The most important, and worrisome, were the multiple messages from Lopaka and her daughter Adriana. I knew Adriana was in the process of planning her weddings, plural, to King Dahlmar of Rusland. Other than sending an RSVP—regrets for the daylight ceremony on Serenity, because of my vampish skin problems; a big yes to the church ceremony in Rusland because I’ve always wanted to see Europe—I had no connection to the wedding. Since Adriana and I aren’t close, that was no surprise.

  Still, they were calling. Eight or ten times each. That meant there was a crisis of some sort. Crap. I so didn’t want to deal with whatever it was. I wanted to ease back into my life, try to make some decisions about my future when I wasn’t caught up in the crisis of the moment. But there you go. I picked up the phone and dialed the number Hiwahiwa, the queen’s assistant, had left, and got her assistant, who told me that the queen was unavailable, but would call me back at her convenience.

  So I hung up and dialed Adriana.

  Now my great-aunt and I get along well, despite the fact that she’s royal, and I’m an American and pretty irreverent besides. But Adriana? That’s a whole ’nother story. The princess can be very … princessy. A diva’s diva. She has a crown and an attitude, and definitely knows how to use both. On top of that she was busy getting ready for the impending nuptials, so I figured I’d get shunted off to an even longer line of assistants. Instead, she answered herself and on the first ring.

  “Hello?”

  “This is Celia Graves—”

  She interrupted me before I could finish. “Celia, thank God! Tell me you’re back from Mexico.” She spoke in a rush, her voice breathless. At a guess I’d have said she was desperate, but that was so out of character as to be completely unbelievable.

  “I’m back.”

  “Oh good.” The relief in her voice was palpable. What the hell was going on? “How soon can you make it down to the docks? We need to talk.”

  I glanced at the wall clock. Not even ten thirty, my first day back, and I was already hip deep in crises. Not a record for me, but close. “Give me an hour.”

  I grabbed my Bluetooth earpiece and headed for my car. I might as well make a couple of calls on the way. I had to leave a message on Bruno’s voice mail, but got hold of Emma. A clairvoyant, she wasn’t exactly surprised that I’d made it back, but she did sound hugely relieved. She didn’t admit it, but I was guessing she’d “peeked” in the mirror she sometimes used as a focus. If she’d been watching me in Mexico, she’d probably gotten quite the eyeful.

  We didn’t chat long. She had a class to teach and traffic was getting heavy enough that I needed to concentrate on my driving.

  Despite the traffic, I made it to the marina with time to spare. I knew my way around from back when a good friend kept his fishing boat here, so it was easy to find Adriana’s slip. Actually, it would have been easy for anyone who knew anything about sirens—all you had to do was follow the gulls. They led the way, soaring and swooping and cawing with excitement, to the nicest yacht in the place.

  Calling Adriana’s vessel a boat was like calling the Hope Diamond a pretty rock. Her ship was freaking huge, with hand-carved teak and brass fittings. The stairway was steep. Not a gangplank—actual stairs. Everything was elegant and perfect, very much like Adriana herself.

  Though I had to admit she wasn’t entirely perfect. As Queen Lopaka’s only daughter, Adriana should have been heir to the throne. Unfortunately, she wasn’t siren enough, because like Emma Landingham, she was a clairvoyant. “True” siren talent can’t coexist with any other paranormal or magical abilities, so she would never take her mother’s throne. Worse, she probably had already seen in a vision just who would.

  Fate can be so cruel.

  She would never rule the Isle of Serenity, but Adriana was every inch a princess. It’s all about the attitude. Today she was wearing big movie-star sunglasses, a man’s dress shirt in white, blue jeans, and boat shoes. On her, it all looked like the height of fashion. Her long red hair had been tied back in a loose tail that did not distract from the amazing bone structure of her face. She was stunning. On my best day I don’t look that good. That bothers me more than it probably shou
ld.

  Adriana met me at the gangplank and invited me on board.

  “Thank you for coming on such short notice.” She smiled, and dolphins began jumping and playing in the water next to the boat. Overhead, my seagull escort wheeled and cawed happily before settling down on various high spots to watch.

  Ever the gracious hostess, Adriana led me to a pair of built-in benches around a small table near the entrance to the cabin area. “Would you like something to drink?” She signaled and a servant instantly appeared from somewhere. “We’ll have brunch now.”

  “Of course, Princess.” He bowed low, backing away.

  She sat and drummed her manicured fingers restlessly on the tabletop.

  I waited for a little bit, letting her squirm. But I’m not really all that patient, and at the rate she was going, it would be next week before she got past the pleasantries. “Why don’t you just spit it out?”

  “Excuse me?” She blinked, obviously shocked.

  I smiled. I didn’t get an advantage over her often. She’s been trained to be poised in almost any situation. But it was obvious she needed something and just as obvious that she was not used to having to ask. I realized that it was highly likely that people had been anticipating her needs and whims since she’d been old enough to walk, maybe before. That explained a lot. If that was the case, she really wasn’t nearly as annoying as she could have been.

  “You brought me here for a reason, and there are no assistants around, so you must need to speak with me alone. Just say whatever it is you need to say. You won’t offend me. I promise.” I smiled again to take any sting out of the words.

  She laughed. “Don’t be so sure. I seem to recall the first time we met, our conversation didn’t go well at all.”

  She was right, of course. I’d accused her of being unpardonably rude and she had challenged me to a duel to the death. Then again, she’d disrupted my best friend’s wake to sing a torch song. “No,” I admitted, “but we’ve come a long way since then.” I didn’t exactly like Adriana, but I’d seen enough of her that I’d grown to respect and admire her. I think she felt the same about me.